Month: January 2017

Over the holidays I ate my body weight in food and then kept eating and was sadly not as productive as I’d hoped. But here is a teeny tiny paper family portrait (they were each about 3cm big) I then turned into a bauble for part of my Mum’s Christmas present (with me ruining that brown and red aesthetic with my ridiculous hair).

I also worked on updating/redecorating my website over here and I’m excited to add an animation section to that front page soon.

Our 60’s counter culture march sequence was due the first day we got back and I realise on this blog this project hasn’t even been mentioned. I genuinely struggled with this project a lot more than I thought I would.

While I hesitated on what part of the history I wanted to focus on (I mean can you really choose between bagism and defying gender and protests and generally just some people being radical and great) I ultimately came back to what I was first drawn to; the Miss World Protests. Portraying this was something I was hesitant about; having a lot of respect for second-wave feminism and all it achieved (but obviously remaining critical of it’s failings to take into account race and gender identity issues) made me second guess my style of character design. My characters are always quite cutesy and disproportionate and I didn’t want this to read as any form of dismissal or belittling of the people involved in the protests. It was a strange ongoing discussion in my head.

Heck maybe I was over thinking it. But I’d rather overthink my work and at the very least be critically aware of what I’m putting out there and what it’s implying.

So my character design ended up being quite simple. Long stereotypical 60’s hair covering the body to try and dismiss notions of physical characteristics defining someones gender (heya bagism) and some little legs and 60’s style long scarf. That was quite simply it. The varying shades of orange reflect quite possibly every 60’s colour palette ever (seriously so many orange tones) and the hair is purple because it is between blue and pink (always coming back to notions of gender).

It was a lot of fretting for a very simple result. But I’m happy and it was fun.

She was originally drawn in Animate CC in our Tuesday classes with Shaun, then animated in After Effects using the puppet tool. I then brought her into TV Paint so I could play with her frame by frame. Her scarf pattern I threw together on illustrator so she’s a super mixed media tiny thing.

I know the Royal Albert Hall didn’t want anything on the signs for our march which I was a bit disappointed about so within her strands of hair are the words of one of the main chants from the Miss World Protests: